Cyanogen, makers of popular software based on Android that extends the abilities of smartphones, is making a bid for the mainstream. The four-year-old company, which began as a one-person side project, said today that it has raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The goal is to vault past Blackberry and Windows Phone to become the third-most popular mobile operating system, after traditional Android and iOS. And the company is already closer than you might think.

The announcement blog post has more details and background. This is either the best idea they've ever had, or the beginning of the end. I honestly have no idea which of the two it will be. I like the fact that they might be more popular than Windows Phone though - puts everything into perspective, doesn't it?

On the other hand, the Blackberry OS is the primary reason why I'm looking at a Blackberry phone.

My experience with Android is worse than miserable. I have an LG G2x and it's so unreliable that I can't receive phone calls, either because it's crashed or the battery drained to zero in a matter of 30 minutes. I have to constantly reboot to get data connectivity back. It seems that this experience with Android is widespread.

To me, because of my experience, Android is not a serious platform. The names "LG" and "Android" have been irrevocably sullied. So there seems to be a danger with having no control over the brand, or quality of forked releases.

Note: Most of your issues with Android are due to the customised version that LG installs, including a lot of extra cruft that no one uses that just soaks up resources. The first thing any user of an LG phone should do is install any other version of Android!

At the very least, install a different homescreen app. And then "disable" the LG one. That will fix most of your issues.